Manly Wade Wellman wrote hundreds of fantasy and horror stories featuring monsters including werewolves. He wrote of them early in the pages of Weird Tales and in comics and in a novel in the 1980s. (Fair warning, this piece contains spoilers.)
The 1930s
The first was “The Horror Undying” (Weird Tales, May 1936) (Manly revised the story for Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa Press and renamed it “The Undead Soldier”.) A man taking rest in an abandoned cabin meets an old man then bunks down for the night. He reads a ‘found’ manuscript and learns about Sergeant I. Stanlas and his crime of cannibalism. Then he reads of Sgt. Maxim and a similar tale of obscene acts. (This story shows Manly’s love of U. S. history, the focus of his later career.) The undead horror that was both Stanlas and Maxim shows up for his manuscript. The old man from earlier appears and destroys the creature. The manuscript-reader learns that Stanlas was a werewolf then became a vampire.
Less than a year later “The Werewolf Snarls” (Weird Tales, March 1937) (aka “Among Those Present”) offered a different kind of tale. At a party held by the Wurthers, the narrator meets a man named Craw. A medical student, Craw, relates how he had delved into witchcraft, in particular, magical rubs that allow transformation. He creates one from the body of a dead infant and applies it to his body. At first nothing happens, but the next night, while on a moonlight date with a co-ed, he turns into a wolf and kills her. The cops arrest him. He tells the truth. They lock him up in an asylum for years. Eventually he learns how to act normally and is released. Now he is at the Wurther’s party on the night of a full moon. The narrator leaves, the next day reading about the murder of four guests.
Having written two traditional stories, it was time for Manly to do a novel. “The Hairy Ones Shall Dance” (Weird Tales, January February March 1938) was serialized over three issues.
Scientist Talbot Wills, and a new acquaintance, Doctor Otto Zoberg, go to a quaint, isolated village to conduct an experiment in supernaturalism. The town resembles an old Devonshire town, a place in England where most of the inhabitants are descended from. Like that place, the villagers have a Devil’s Croft, a thick grove of trees that people are discouraged from visiting. The outsiders have come to the town because of a woman named Susan Gird, a medium. Also living in the village is a retired judge named Keith Pursuivant.
Wills conducts his experiment with Susan Gird, Dr. Zoberg and the scientist hand-cuffed together. Gird’s father watches from a near-by chair, also cuffed. Wills goes to great lengths to create scientifically provable results. Being a magician himself, the scientist knows all the tricks. Very quickly once the lights are turned down, a wolf shape appears. The room fills with a terrible beast smell. The animal rips the throat out of the watching Gird before disappearing.
Wills unlocks everybody as the local constable, O’Bryant, shows up. Gird’s throat has been completely ripped out but Wills is blamed and arrested. The constable takes the man to a makeshift jail cell at the top of a hotel. The local townsfolk become hot and bothered rather quickly, storming the jail. Wills manages to break one of the cell bars and escapes into the snow. The lynch mob chases him to the outskirts of the Devil’s Croft, refusing to follow any further.
Inside the woods, Wills finds a hot atmosphere and creeks of burning hot water. The place is fed by hot springs. A dark, wolf-like shape attacks him but he manages to fight it off, escaping back into the snow outside the croft. The scientist is found by Judge Pursuivant, who takes him to his house outside of town and feeds and warms him up. The two spend many pages discussing werewolfery: can it be explained scientifically? The Judge quotes several real authorities including Montague Summers.
Wills goes to bed and sleeps a long time. When he wakes he finds Pursuivant has had visitors. The mob of hunters had shown up. To throw them off the scent, the Judge joined them in a few hours of fruitless searching. Pursuivant needs to go to town to wrap up some loose ends (which he does not reveal in a most Jules de Grandin-like way). Talbot Wills spends the day reading poetry and trying to wrap his brain around lycanthropy. Susan Gird shows up, having been sent by the Judge. The two read more poetry and fall further in love until the Judge returns with news. Constable O’Bryant’s brother, who had been acting sheriff, has been killed.
For the final confrontation, Susan and Wills are sent to the Devil’s Croft to wait for the werewolf. They build a big fire. Light is the best weapon (since they do not want to kill the beast) for it reveals the man under the ectoplasm. Pursuivant explains that the werewolf is really an ectoplasmic projection of the lycanthrope. Light and bravery are two things it hates, for it must fool its victims into fearing it.
The werewolf comes prowling and almost manages to draw Susan away from the fire. Wills stops her. Later the Judge, Dr. Zoberg and Constable O’Bryant show up. O’Bryant oddly doesn’t acknowledge the scientist. Wills finds out that Zoberg has hypnotized him because he was faltering at the edge of the Croft. Now released he draws his gun until Pursuivant reminds him that Wills is not the killer.
The cop, the judge and scientist all go in search with lanterns to find the tracks of the monster. Zoberg is left with Susan by the fire. Wills finds the tracks, looking where he heard noise earlier. The tracks are circular in shape. He searches a while before circling back to the fire. Here he sees Zoberg putting ectoplasm on Susan’s head. Wills bursts in, pulling the stuff off. The man and werewolf begin fighting, with Wills the victor.
Pursuivant and the constable show up and arrest Zoberg. (It had been Pursuivant’s plan to get Zoberg and Susan together alone.) The constable snaps handcuffs on the werewolf. The man admits his entire history (very similar to Craw’s from “The Werewolf Snarls”) and what it has to do with Susan. In Germany, Zoberg had met Susan’s mother during the war. Susan’s mom was a powerful medium. During that time, Zoberg had been locked up as a killer and madman. With the war over, he was released and came to America to find Susan’s mother, who had died. Zoberg found the daughter a splitting image of her and planned to turn her to werewolfery, hoping she too was a medium. To do this, he had to convince her she was a great psychic, which it turned out she was not. At the seance it was actually Zoberg who summons the ectoplasm. He killed Mr. Gird because he saw this. Zoberg could get out of the cuffs because the ectoplasm allowed him to thicken and lengthen his limbs.
Saying this, he slips out of O’Bryant’s cuffs and tries to escape. Pursuivant calls to the constable to shoot and he does. Zoberg dies. The Judge explains everything, making reference to Algernon Blackwood’s ectoplasmic werewolf story “The Camp of the Dog”. Only a medium, one who can summon ectoplasm, can be a werewolf.
Wellman’s story has many layers and things of interest in it. First, we see his love of history again, referring to all kinds of actual werewolf lore. The middle section is light on action because he has that conversation between the two men. Also we see Wellman the Mystery Writer at work, making this a tale in which you have to guess the werewolf. Manly didn’t invent this. I suspect that was Jessie Douglas Kerruish and her The Undying Monster (1922). After that novel, it became a thing to try and hide the identity of the werewolf. James Blish did it in “There Shall be No Darkness” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950) and its film version, The Beast Must Die (1974) with its famous “werewolf break” where audience members engage in an Ellery Queen style “Challenge to the Reader” to guess who is the werewolf. Basil Copper in The House of the Wolf (1983) and Charles L. Grant would also keep their werewolves secret in The Dark Cry of the Moon (1986). Manly would write straight detective stories for G-Man, Popular Detective, Boys’ Life and Ellery Queen as well as the comics. Judge Pursuivant would appear again without Wills in three more stories before moving onto his greatest Weird Tales, detective, John Thunstone.
The 1940s
In 1940 Manly began writing “Squinkies” (as he called them)… comics. “When the Werewolf Prowled” appeared under the house name Juan Lopez in Gift Comics #1,1942. The hero, Ibis the Invisible, is not so different from Wellman’s own ghostbreakers, Judge Keith Pursuivant, John Thunstone or Silver John the Balladeer. In many ways this piece reads like a very short version of “The Hairy Ones Shall Dance”.
Manly wrote about vampires who turn into wolves in the first issue of Captain Marvel Adventures (March 1941). The comic drawn by Jack Kirby and Dick Briefer. Doctor Deever takes Billy Batson to the graveyard to witness his new formula to raise the dead. Billy asks if it is science or witchcraft? Deever’s answer: “Perhaps it’s something of both. The old wizards and magicians had plenty of science in their sorcery…” This is an idea found in most of Manly’s longer werewolf tales. Deever raises Bram Thirla, a notorious bad guy as a vampire. 
Thirla drinks Deever’s blood (slightly off camera). The vamp tries to hurt Captain Marvel but can’t. Cap tries to hurt Thirla but can’t either. the vampire flees with the rising sun. Billy goes to the library to research his enemy. He is given the best book on vampires. Wellman slips in a memorial for one of his favorite writers, H. P. Lovecraft. (You might not associate HPL with werewolves. He is famous for creatures like Cthulhu and shoggoths. But it was Lovecraft who suggested a writer should tell the werewolf’s story from the lycanthrope’s POV, which H. Warner Munn did in “The Werewolf of Ponkert”.)
Thirla comes to Billy’s home to kill him. Unfortunately for him, Billy has a half-eaten garlic sausage sandwich on his desk. Thirla flees. Billy tells everyone on his radio show to protect themselves with garlic. Thirla raises more vampires to join him. When Billy shows at the graveyard, they turn into wolves to attack. Captain Marvel beats them back. Thirla brings in the heavy artillery, a wolf the size of an elephant. The wolf swallows Captain Marvel but the Big Red Cheese explodes through the animal’s gut, killing it. Thirla drops dead when the sun rises. Cap unwisely buries him again, thinking his problems are over.
Thirla ambushes Billy once night falls. Billy says Shazam! and faces off with Thirla for the last time. This time he has a stake of white thorn wood. Thirla gets it through the chest (off camera) and the vampire is dead at last.
Bram Stoker gave us the connection between vampires and werewolves that Manly used in two stories. Once again we see knowledge about the occult being the answer to dealing with the creatures of darkness. This philosophy never changes for Wellman in any medium.
The 1950s
“The Last Grave of Lill Warran” (Weird Tales, May 1951) has John Thunstone visiting the Sand Hills and the remote town of Beaver Dam. By the old courthouse he talks with some loafers about Lill Warran. The body of the witch had been dug up and thrown into Pos Parrell’s yard. The detective goes up the mountain where Parrell lives, to find him carving a headstone for the second grave of Lill Warren.
The possum-faced man doesn’t like strangers and tries to stab Thunstone with a chisel. John draws the silver sword from the walking stick he carries. He taps Pos and the wrist, disarming him. After the scuffle, the two men talk. John learns that Lill was a witch and she slept with most of the men in town. The result was usually bad for the man involved. Despite this, Pos loved her and paid for her first funeral. Talk had it that the townfolk wouldn’t abide a witch to be buried in the churchyard and had dug her up.
John asks about how Lill died. One of her beaus, Taylor Howatt, had seen a wolf hanging around his cabin, even though there were no longer any wolves in the region, and crafted a silver bullet to kill it. When the beast showed up in the moonlight he shot it. The next morning Lill Warren was found dead. The townfolk said she had been a werewolf.
John spends some time with Pos, helping him set the gravestone, seeing a photograph of Lill, who was a strikingly sensuous girl. The two men eat a simple meal before Pos falls off to sleep. John spend a little while writing a letter to his friend, Jules de Grandin, then pretends to sleep, keeping his sword cane handy. A visitor creeps into the cabin. It is Lill Warren, arisen again from her grave. She has come to claim Pos since he loves her. John tells her to leave. She attacks him with her taloned fingers. Thunstone drives the silver sword clear through her.
Pos awakens from his magically-induced sleep and the two men bury Lill Warren for the last time. Thunstone recalls Montague Summers and Cyprien Robert who believed a dead werewolf would return as a vampire. No one had unburied Lill. She had crawled from her grave in search of new victims.
Wellman has circled back to his first Weird Tales werewolf in “The Horror Undying” but this time he has taken the time to craft a story about people as well as monsters. The character of Pos Parrell is a bittersweet portrait of unrequited love. Wellman sets it in the rural woods and farms of the mountains, a setting he would make famous with his next occult detective, Silver John.
The 1980s
John the Balladeer never got to face off against werewolves in the pages of Weird Tales. (John appeared in later in Fantasy & Science Fiction.) Wellman rectified this with the Silver John novel, The Hanging Stones (1982). John, the singer with the silver-stringed guitar finds a replica of Stonehenge in the Appalachian Mountains. He knows the structure has great power, but doesn’t know what the builders will do with that power. The bad guys have some help from shape changers:
He hunched his ugly self there in front of me, another sight change from what he’d first looked to be. His sprawly nose had sprawled out wider, it had got to be pooched out like a snout, with big quivery nostrils. Again I saw him show those sharp teeth in his mouth. His hands—I kept them in my sight, you can just bet—looked shaggyhaired and long-nailed. He wasn’t a pretty thing to look on, that fall day in those woods. But I kept awatching him, as level as he watched me…
I’d keep his sharp teeth from ajamming into me. Maybe I’d take a scratch from his long sharp nails, and meanwhile I’d smack my fist right into his big thick mouth, to chop his lips open against his teeth. That would draw his blood, if I knew my strength. I was ready to do it That’s when I even took a step of my own toward him, and he drew back a step of his own. Now his face was turned shaggy all over, coarse shaggy, more like a hog’s than a wolfs. His ears stuck up and his snout trembled and his eyes shone like two hard chunks of a cold winter sky. He might could have been a mite put off by how I talked and acted But right in that same second, he had a bad animal look all over him, and it took all the nerve I had in me to make another step in at him.
As with all supernatural villains, John knows how to handle them. Armed with info from the works of Montague Summers, the ballad-singer knows that the werewolf is a coward and bully at heart. The lycanthrope must make you afraid before it can hurt you. The righteous man can easily defeat it. Not very Hollywood, Wellman is working with folklore of Europe and America, with the books of writers like Summers and Algernon Blackwood. Like the Ugly Bird, the Shonokins and all Creatures High and Low, Wellman’s werewolves are no match for the good, Christian man.
Like Manly Banister and Seabury Quinn, Manly Wade Wellman used old lore to spin a collection of truly American stories where heroes armed with occult knowledge put down the forces of evil.
